Through gritted teeth

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THE new novel arrived fully formed: Zadie Smith woke up one
morning and On Beauty was all there, in her head. She
wanted to write a long marriage - she'd just got married herself
and was curious what 30 years of it would be like - and she had a
plot.

When she described it to her new husband, poet and novelist Nick
Laird, however, he pointed out she was simply rewriting Howards
End. But she has never been afraid of tribute and Forster was
a "first love"; she had a couple of serious wobbles but this did
not put her off. In fact, she paid more tributes: to Nabokov,
Elaine Scarry, Simon Schama; there's even a touch of Eminem's 8
Mile.

But On Beauty, which is on the shortlist for the Man
Booker Prize, is also a sustained attempt to enact ideas she's been
mulling over for a few years: that the novel - writing a novel,
reading a novel - is an ethical enterprise, a practice place for
morals where we watch, in safety, people choosing what they must
do, and what they lose when they choose wrongly; that it is the
closest possible rehearsal for the real thing, which is the most
important thing of all.

"Good writing requires - demands - good being," she wrote a
couple of years ago. "I'm absolutely adamant on this point."

This is an uncool, old-fashioned idea; in this, and in its
determined engagement with tradition, with the canon, it runs
counter to the high-ironic, ultra-trendy playfulness casual readers
of the novel that made her name, White Teeth, might expect.

In an essay on Forster written in 2003, Smith sets the author of
Howards End against Jane Austen in order to highlight what she sees
as his particular, freeing innovation: "He allowed the English
comic novel the possibility of a spiritual and bodily life, not
simply to exist as an exquisitely worked game of social ethics, but
as a messy human concoction. He expanded the comic novel's ethical
space (while unbalancing its moral certainties) simply by letting
more of life 'in'."

This open multiplicity is an article of faith and she has chased
the idea through a series of essays she intends to gather into a
book on ethics in the novel.

The planned book, which she hopes will be eligible as a PhD
thesis that might enable her to return as a don to another first
love, Cambridge University, is to include studies of Updike, Zora
Neale Hurston, Sebald, possibly Roth, and definitely David Foster
Wallace, who has been at the centre of an illuminating, continuing
tussle between her and another critic for New Republic, James Wood;
a tussle which, just after 9/11, escalated briefly into what she
now calls, with characteristic earthiness, a "bitch-fight".

When White Teeth was published in 2000, Wood placed it
in a tradition he called "hysterical realism": books that contain
so many people, so much information, that it paradoxically drowns
out their humanity.

The novel has encountered a "crisis of character, and how to
represent it in fiction", he argued, using DeLillo, Wolfe, Eggers
and Foster Wallace as examples. "Bright lights are taken as
evidence of habitation" and "information has become the new
character", he said. September 11, he added, gave hysterical
realism a new irrelevance; it was time it died.

Smith, who's now friendly with Wood, agreed it was "a painfully
accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose to be found in
novels like White Teeth", but took issue with Wood's wish;
with his understanding of "information"; and especially with his
inclusion of Wallace.

"I do think that for a much younger generation information has
emotional content," she says now.

"Certainly, when I read Foster Wallace, sometimes I'm moved to
tears, but I think maybe that would be inaccessible to someone over
60. All they would see is the equivalent of logarithms in
literature."

Replying to Wood she concluded "it's all laughter in the dark -
the title of a Nabokov novel and still the best term for the kind
of writing I aspire to: not a division of head and heart, but the
useful employment of both."

White Teeth takes Archie, 47, middle-aged, washed-up,
just returned from the brink of suicide; Clara, 19, Jamaican
ex-Jehovah's Witness; their daughter Irie; Archie's best friend
Samad, a Bengali refugee, also married to a woman far younger,
Alsana; and their twins, Millat and Majid, mixes them up in a tale
of cloning, animal rights, race, Islamic and Christian
fundamentalism, and rumours of the end of the world, and places
them in Willesden, north-west London, where Smith grew up.

Smith's father is English, a "working-class lad from East
Croydon" who joined the army in May 1943, aged 17, and first saw
action at Normandy. Archie (who works in direct mail, as Smith's
father eventually did, after a brief spell as a photographer) first
meets Samad in a tank in World War II, but Smith did not know much
about her father's experience when she wrote the book.

She finally interrogated him for a newspaper piece in 2004; she
discovered that he was injured at Normandy and that near the end of
the war "he caught a senior Nazi. He helped liberate Belsen. In
Germany, he was part of the reconstruction efforts."

She gives an affectionate, slightly impatient portrait of a
"sentimental man, physically gentle, pacifistic in all things", who
nevertheless displayed bravery in extremis.

She's good on fathers. The most, some might say only, really
moving section of The Autograph Man, her second novel, is
the prologue, a simultaneously knockabout and tender portrait of a
father and his 12-year-old son.

And in On Beauty there's a short scene in which Howard,
an aggressively liberal, sometime working-class English professor,
goes back to see his father. Here she targets unerringly the
difficulty of expressing love, especially when generations have
been sundered by class, politics, education, or simply growing
up.

SMITH'S mother emigrated from Jamaica as a 15-year-old. She
modelled briefly, was a secretary, did "youth and community
studies" at Brunel University, and is now a psychotherapist and a
consultant to parents for the charity Young Minds. In a section of
White Teeth that attracted some slightly shocked,
disapproving comment, Smith ruthlessly mocked an upper-middle class
liberal family, the Chalfens. It is overdone, cartoonish in places,
but what is hard to miss is its anger and envy, channelled through
Irie.

"I think when I was growing up I was very, very aware of not
being middle class; much more aware than of being black as an
unusual thing. I never wanted to be white, but I always wanted to
be middle class. I liked the big house, I liked the piano, I liked
the cats, the cello lessons."

It's a subject she returns to, in a more nuanced way, in On
Beauty: Howard Belsey, an untenured professor at an East Coast
liberal arts college, is white and English, married to Kiki, a
black woman from Florida; his academic enemy is Monty Kipps, a
black British man married to a Caribbean woman - but also
celebrated, and titled.

Setting it in America means race can be discussed in a more
open, different way than it can be in Britain, but again, class
trumps everything. A poor black rapper called Carl is treated well
but condescended to, and rebuffed the minute he assumes equality.
"You people aren't even 'black' anymore, man - I don't know what
you are," he says, in hurt. The answer is middle class.

On the other hand, says Smith, although "I didn't come from a
background where there was any sense of entitlement, there was no
sense of limit. My mother's the sort of person who if I said to her
'I think I want to grow up to be a jockey', she'd be like 'Great.
Fine'."

Zadie Smith progressed, she says, pretty normally through a
"normal" school, Hampstead Comprehensive in Cricklewood, a big,
extremely mixed school in London, part of a "close-knit" group with
whom she is still friends. In her spare time she tap danced, for 11
years; and she read. Later, Cambridge was "a joy", she says.

"Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my
fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still." And, elsewhere, "I was
pretty much the only black girl. So I was something of exotic
interest, in the same way that I found public schoolboys incredibly
exotic, because I'd never seen anybody like that. So, you know, you
get laid a lot. That's one advantage . . . I took out three student
loans and lived the life of Riley."

She worked hard too, and wrote more fiction; in her second year
she published a story in an annual Oxbridge creative writing
collection called The May Anthologies; she met Laird, who
edited her, at the launch party; they became friends.

The May Anthologies story attracted the attention of at
least one publisher. In their third year Laird and Smith entered
work for a literary prize: he won, and about a month later, having
written about 100 pages of what would become White Teeth
as well as studying for her finals, she signed a contract for a
reported £250,000 ($A590,000).

That was news enough; the fact that White Teeth was
also not bad sent commentators into adjectival tizzies. In its
blithe jumbling of colours and creeds White Teeth did
something new among books about minority experience, says her
friend novelist Hari Kunzru; she wrote "about being already here.
She did it very easily and naturally." It was, for once, a
comparatively cheery vision, and the chattering classes descended
on it in noisy relief.

The praise is, of course, double-edged: it is tinged with the
kind of liberal condescension, well meaning, perhaps, but somewhat
racist also, that she skewered in White Teeth; and it
required her to be an icon far larger than her 24-year-old self,
asked to commentate on, represent, be the acceptable face of
multicultural Britain.

Combined with the fact that she is a woman - which Smith has
always felt is more of a challenge than race or class - it was too
much.

Late in The Autograph Man (2002), which is about the
empty, corroding nature of fame, Alex-Li, the autograph man of the
title, acquires the rare signature of a reclusive star and sells it
at auction; he is suddenly, in his world, famous, and realises that
he feels "a new order of fraudulence. He was not only not the
person they thought he was (rich, lucky, shrewd), he was not the
person he thought he was either (useless, damaged, doomed)".

By the time the book was published, coinciding with a Channel 4
dramatisation of White Teeth, Smith had begun to learn yet
another aspect of fame: envy, bitchiness, backlash. And far more
mixed reviews, this time, for a book that is cerebral, tricksy,
written in the self-conscious-making glare of publicity.

We meet in a restaurant in Willesden, where, Smith says, she can
"walk down these streets and know everybody". She's confident,
fierce, impatient; animated, especially when discussing books, her
props a tube of lip gloss and a succession of quickly smoked
roll-your-owns; yet this co-exists with what Laird calls, in To
A Fault, a face "closed to the public".

"I refuse to do any television and I won't do anything which
makes my life un-normal," says Smith. "But it's amazing! Do you
want to go on a dating program, do you want to stand on your head
in the park? It's constant. But I won't go on the front cover of a
magazine. I won't do any of it. I have my life, and I don't care
how many people try and stop me from having it." Immediately after
publishing The Autograph Man she left for America, which
already had a strong hold on her imagination; critics noticed a
tendency in that book to channel the whimsy of Dave Eggers'
magazine McSweeney's.

"That will always be me - I'm so easily influenced. I read
somebody, and then I just write their book again. But it's all
learning. If you're going to write a good book, you have to make
mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.

"But the freedom that reading American writers gave me I don't
regret at all. Particularly when writing a first-person essay I'm
not all bunched up - I don't have to write this perfect formal
essay. I can say what I think, and what I believe. And I didn't
know that from English writing, apart from maybe Woolf, but even
then it's so elaborately styled."

AT Harvard she taught creative writing and a course on ethics in
the novel. At first she was lonely and she would go out for dinner
with the writers afterwards, discovering, to her glee, that writers
are "so like their books. And that really blew me away. It also
released my criticism because you realise that it's the full man
who's writing. The faults he makes in his prose are often the
faults he makes in his life.

"The same is true for me - it's something you learn from
practising, rather than being a critic."

Although she was still wedded to the idea of writing
19th-century, English, realist novels, she began attempting short
stories, finding that "you become a different writer when you
approach a short story. When things are not always having to
represent other things you find real human beings begin to
cautiously appear on your pages."

Contentment in her marriage and increased confidence have given
a greater maturity, a joyfulness, to On Beauty. And they
have given it a compulsively readable sense of personal danger, of
how fragile things - family, love, trust - are, how easy to
break.

But she also knows the other fragile thing for a writer is the
self, which is so much, in Ian McEwan's phrase, "on the line and in
use", especially if so much learning is being done in the public
eye. Now she's contemplating another escape from the country.

When the Booker long-list was announced a few weeks ago, Smith,
having just finished On Beauty, was holidaying by a pool
in Ibiza. Her mother called, "and she was reading bits of
newspapers out to me - and I was being described as this
established, status quo novelist! In what kind of culture does
three novels make you . . . it's absurd! This is a lifetime's work,
and I'm an apprentice! Coetzee is an author. I'm a beginner."